Zenkey, zonkey, zebra donkey!

by David Catchpoole

A zoo in Japan has proudly announced the birth of a zebra-donkey hybrid, describing it as a ‘zenkey’—a story excitedly picked up and relayed around the world by news media.¹

Actually, the offspring of a zebra stallion and donkey mare (jenny) is more usually defined as a ‘zonkey’ or ‘zedonk’, or even ‘zebrass’. But whether zenkey, zonkey or zedonk, the appearance of this little foal sure caused a stir at Nasu Safari Park (near Tokyo).

‘As we keep herbivorous animals without separating them, the unbelievable can happen’, said Osamu Ishikawa, deputy head of the safari park. ‘A donkey was pregnant and everybody was expecting a donkey foal.’

But the keepers were surprised when, in August 2003, a striped foal was born! Was it a donkey, or … ? It had a donkey’s ears, and the black cross mark on its withers² is characteristic of donkey foals, but oh … those stripes! [Photo available in Creation magazine.]

This is not the first time the arrival of a half-zebra foal from a non-zebra mare has surprised observers. A Shetland pony astonished its UK owners by giving birth to a half-zebra, half-horse foal—a ‘zorse’ or ‘zony’.³ The owners had earlier purchased the pony from a wildlife park, where, like the donkey mare at Nasu Safari Park, it had shared a field with a male zebra.

This ability of donkeys, horses and zebras to breed with one another indicates they all descended from the same original created ‘kind’, as specified in Genesis 1.⁴ This again helps us understand that Noah needed far fewer animals on the Ark than sceptics claim. Only two animals (maybe not horses as we know them today) were needed to represent the equine kind on the Ark.⁵

Some people might argue that because hybrid offspring are often sterile, the horse, ass and zebra must therefore be separate created kinds. But this definition goes beyond the biblical text—no-one would say that a human male/female couple unable to have children must therefore be separate species!

Infertility in hybrid offspring can be due to rearrangements of chromosomes. Such (non-evolutionary) changes within the horse kind sees zebras today with 44 chromosomes, donkeys 62, and horses 64—so mules, the offspring of donkeys and horses, are often sterile as they end up with 63 chromosomes, which theoretically cannot divide into chromosome pairs.

However, accounts of mules giving birth⁶ show they are not always infertile, and also demonstrate that the genetics in such cases is not yet fully understood. Occasional fertile hybrids such as these strengthen the case that all Equus species and their offspring (mules, hinnies, zorses, zonies, zedonks/zonkeys and whatever other inventive names we give them) are the same created kind—descendants of the ‘horses’ that Noah let loose after the Flood around 4,500 years ago.

References and notes

Zenkey foal a hybrid star, Sydney Morning Herald, <www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/08/28/1062050609625.html>, 2 October 2003.
The highest part of a horse’s back, lying at the base of the neck above the shoulders.
Shetland–Zebra hybrid, Creation 24(1):9, 2001.
Batten, D., Ligers and wholphins—what next? Creation 22(3):28–33, 2000.
Assuming that Noah understood ‘clean’ and ‘unclean’ the same way that God later decreed to Moses (Leviticus 11:3–4, 26; Deuteronomy 14:6), only one pair of ‘horses’, not seven, were needed (Genesis 7:2).
Mule gives birth, Creation 25(2):9, 2003.

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